Trinity

May 2023 and I am on a road trip, driving across my second favorite state. Not far from where I stood six years ago, in the crater where the Atomic Age began. Quite the journey getting here, I remember thinking that day. Not just now. Most of my life, really. But where to begin so that it all makes sense to you? 

Fire. Maybe that’s where it all starts. Maybe that’s where it’ll end.

Few places have drawn me in as much as New Mexico. And the river that cuts it in half like a long jagged scar. I used to think it was Taos and the surrounding landscape that I kept circling back to. But actually it’s the river—one of North America’s great arteries—cutting a rugged gorge just west of town, that keeps calling me back.  

The Rio Grande.

And the wide corridor it’s sculpted all the way from Canby Mountain, hundreds of miles north, to the Gulf of Mexico, nearly a thousand miles south and east. If you could ever fully understand this river you would understand not only the elements—rock, fire, wind, water, sky—but the laws of Physics and God and Humankind. You’d understand History, Geology. Politics. War. Love, laughter, music, and murder.

You’d know all this world has to offer.

Northern New Mexico, where I lived west of Taos near the rim of the Rio Grande Gorge, is shockingly beautiful. Stunning, from the high alpine tundra of the Sangre de Cristos to the bottom of the deepest valleys and canyons. Every new moment paints this haunting landscape differently. It’s never the same each time I look away and turn back again. There’s a reason so many artists are drawn to New Mexico—a quality of light found nowhere else in the world.

But also a lot of darkness.

And that’s what I’ve been trying to understand ever since I first lived here almost a decade ago. Part of the violence is a result of poverty, no doubt. Desperate people do desperate things. New Mexico, the second poorest state in the country, in many ways is still war-torn Old Mexico. But it’s more than that. Especially standing here where the first atom was split, where we first played God, scrambling those same laws of Physics and inventing a weapon whose power, especially now, is beyond comprehension. The imagination can only balk to take its measure.

This landscape itself is a result of violence. Most of the mountains that funnel the Rio Grande south were born of fire. You can still see it in Ute or San Antonio mountains—Cerros that bubbled up as molten lava and dried hard. Or the nearby San Juans, the result of the largest and most violent volcanic episode in Earth’s history.

Some of the first tribes, after crossing the Land Bridge from Asia, fought south all the way to the Rio Grande. The Navajo. Ute. Apache. Until the Spanish Empire came to massacre them. Later Mexico fought a bloody campaign to overthrow the Spanish and establish their own nation—one that extended as far north as modern-day Wyoming. Until we took half of it from them, adding our own layer of blood to this river’s banks.

And then to leave the greatest mark of all—here, in this immense yet tired wedge of desert, just east of the Rio Grande, where we detonated the first atomic bomb, irreversibly ushering the entire world into the Nuclear age. Quite possibly our final age.

I’ve travelled to the Trinity site to try to understand that darkness. Why I’m scared to leave my girlfriend and her daughter home alone. Why people around here hardly think twice when bodies show up in ditches or acequias. New Mexico is the only state I’ve known where even in small towns people have bars on their windows. A few years ago, two women were pulled behind a truck, dragged across the mesa by rope and noose till their heads came off. Teenagers jump to their death from the Rio Grande Bridge and just a month or two ago a Taos coffee shop owner was brutally murdered after shooting his neighbor’s dog.   

I’ve come to this site with two of my favorite people. Eric Mack and Troy Paff. Both Taos locals. And both, like me, fascinated by history. Well, to be fair, I was never all that interested till I moved to this baffling, complex place and tried peeling back the layers.

I’ve known Eric since my earliest days in Alaska, over twenty years ago. He’s one of the smartest and funniest people I know—a journalist published in Forbes, CNET, and NPR.

Troy and I have known each other only half as long, but have some kind of cosmic connection, crossing paths “coincidentally” in places as random, but powerful, as Jerusalem and Standing Rock. Troy’s a film-maker and marathon runner who’s climbed Kilimanjaro and, aside from Antarctica, made films in every continent on Earth. I invited these two because I knew our drive here would be filled with interesting conversation. And I was right.

Though they call it one, this is actually not much of a crater, but a faint depression where, almost eighty years ago, the world’s first A-Bomb was detonated. The first Nuclear explosion, only three weeks before the first two bombs of its kind would be used in war, killing a quarter of a million people between Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It makes sense that this 30 by 100 mile strip of barren desert would be used to test our explosives. White Sands Missile Range. The largest military installation in the United States. 8,300 square kilometers. 40 miles wide and a hundred miles long. It’s about the size of New Jersey. At 2.2 million acres, it spans five New Mexican counties. A huge chunk of an already huge state. It’s only open to the public twice a year. And this happens to be one of those days.

Just west of here the Rio Grande snakes south, cutting its corridor through a simultaneously sacred and Godless place. Sometimes lazy. Other times violently. But perpetually, and without rest, churning its waters ever south and east. Toward the Gulf.

I need to understand this river. From beginning to end. Headwaters to mouth. I’ve already spent plenty of time in the mountains of Colorado where it emerges from rain and alpine waterfalls. Where snowfields melt and coalesce into the tributary streams that form the river. But I am only beginning to journey south. Where the Rio eventually widens and slows and forms a boundary between nations. Where the foundations of a new and menacing wall are being designed along its banks.

This vast expanse of desert where Eric and Troy and I now stand at the Trinity site is part of a valley the Spanish called Jornada del Muerto—Journey of the dead. But is anything so simple? So black and white? Right or wrong? What if the Nazis had developed this technology first? And detonated the original Atomic bomb? How then would history have been carved?

I don’t know. Maybe the so-called darkness here is just something I feel.

Still I need to know. Where did this river go wrong? Between pure alpine headwaters and a stagnant, murky mouth? Where did we go wrong? Between now and a time when our ancestors seemed to live seamlessly with the Natural World? From there to the Trinity Site. To slow down, stop, or even reverse this new flow would take such a radical shift in our collective consciousness that I shudder to imagine what would trigger it. And yet it could be the only thing that may save Humanity.

All I know is that 74 years ago, in this exact spot, the first atom was split, detonating the first atomic explosion. At point six seconds after detonation the sand at Trinity Site was super-heated, melted, and cooled so quickly that it formed its own rock. Trinitite. Greenish. Otherworldly. And found only here. Nowhere else on Earth. At a full ten seconds a mushroom cloud rose above New Mexico, lighting up the pre-dawn darkness brighter than any daylight. Twelve seconds later nuclear winds rippled outward obliterating anything in their paths for miles and miles. A full minute later, somewhere in Albuquerque—eighty miles north—a blind woman standing in front of a south-facing window reported “seeing” what she could only describe as light.

Point six seconds before that explosion the world was a much safer place. Point eight seconds earlier Earth was way more predictable than it would ever be again. Three years earlier my mother was born and six years before that, my father. Eighty four years prior, the bloodiest war in U.S. history killed 600,000 Americans, a mere fraction of what a modern nuclear bomb could do in a matter of seconds.

One hundred and eighty years before the first atom was split, the Industrial Revolution began. Two thousand years before that a man billions would later follow—whose life would become the hinge on which we measure human history—would die on a cross. One hundred thousand years before Trinity Site we began grasping mortality and started burying our dead.

Maybe there was no one fateful twist in the course of humanity—the tumultuous river of primate evolution. Maybe it started the way it will end. With fire. And a stout, hairy figure, shivering in darkness. Maybe it all starts there. When that same shadowy figure—two hundred and fifty thousand years before the first atom will split—bends to flint and stone. Crashes the two together.

And gives birth to fire.